Understanding And Implementing Inclusion In Museums

Do museums need to be inclusive? How do we define inclusion? Understanding and Implementing Inclusion in Museums is the pioneer text to focus solely on the notion of inclusion for museums. This book is intended to demystify the much-debated idea of inclusion for museum professionals, theorists, professors, and researchers. The chapters within this book are intended to function as a guide for understanding, implementing, and evaluating inclusion in your museum. This insightful examination ofinclusion in museums features: An introductory definition of inclusion for museums. Guidelines for creating inclusion in your museum through partnerships with people and community organizations. Strategies for driving social change through inclusive museum practice. Tools for implementing inclusion in your museum. Mechanisms for evaluating the inclusiveness of your museum. An encyclopedic Who’s Who of museum professionals serving as advocates, agents, and architects of inclusion today. An extensive resource list to aid you and your museum. We have never had a book solely about inclusion for museums, and never with such a strong focus on American institutions. I invite you to join the conversation concerning inclusion armed with greater understanding and the tools to implement change through your museum.

"Inclusion” is a word, a concept, a value, a set of practices, but what should it mean for museum staff and leaders as they envision new ways of being a museum in an emergent future? Political and environmental upheavals, and now a global pandemic, are transforming the museum landscape forever. How can our paradigm for understanding inclusion continue to transform as well? This book offers a new paradigm for understanding inclusion grounded in a retrospective of museum worker efforts to test the limits of inclusion, a reflection on inclusion’s advantages and limitations in practice, as well as the integral concerns of racial equity and social justice. Questions throughout the book invite readers to reflect on how their own experiences can add to, and expand on, new ways of thinking about inclusion in museums. Museum workers and lovers can use this book as a tool for engaging with “inclusion” anew, and as a terrain for collaborative inquiry and world-building that can help us imagine and realize new potential for museums in the future.

Focused on multiple-scenario planning method, Museum Resilience gets to the “how” for expanding inclusivity and decolonization efforts, as well as adapting in a time of visitation and financial challenges. Unique features of the book include explaining worldview differences, value-based planning techniques (adaptive and multiple-scenario), the specifics of expanding museum income through collaborations, and ways of developing learning programs that support cultural continuance. The author has field-tested these methods for 30 years (over 50 plans completed), blending her graduate degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Urban and Regional Planning to design methods for cross-cultural planning. Integral to the book are planning processes for museums to use with communities in addressing these issues. Each chapter contains an annotated “Further Readings” feature, useful for textbook readers. Another feature of the book is the integration of examples concerning potential roles museums can take in opening environmental awareness. The author is an experienced leader in culturally diverse issues, focusing on value-based planning and designing techniques that work across cultures.

The Sustainable Museum is the first book to outline a coherent strategy for the direction of museums, as it relates to sustainability in the museum and heritage sector. Arguing that museums must place sustainability at the centre of all their activities, if they are to become key actors with a clear societal role, Garthe considers the issues that museums will likely face as they take on their new roles. Presenting case studies from a wide range of museums around the world, the book considers different ways of implementing sustainability in different types and sizes of institutions. Whilst the book clearly outlines the need for change, it also provides guidance about how to change. Garthe does this by considering specific concepts and approaches to sustainability in relation to the different aspects of museum operations. The book includes a hands-on manual for implementing sustainability management in a museum, whilst also considering the challenges practitioners will encounter and considering what the future of the sustainable museum might look like. The Sustainable Museum will be essential reading for museum and heritage professionals around the globe. The book will also be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, arts and cultural management, business administration, change management or sustainable development.

Consequential Museum Spaces offers a comparative analysis of regional African American museum. The author examines buildings, exhibitions, major themes, and relationships with the public in the context of contemporary issues involving memory and history, corrective history, intergenerational trauma, human rights, and historical consciousness.

How does a diverse community thrive in spaces that were designed to be exclusionary? Museums—with histories tied to colonial violence and racist practices and whose survival is largely reliant on the generosity of wealthy donors—were not built to be inclusive. Yet many museums’ missions and the people who bring these missions to life have egalitarian aims. In recent years museum practitioners across the country have been proactively confronting our histories of colonization and exclusion and advancing equity and inclusion. Museums of all types have formed cross-departmental teams to critique their internal practices, review hiring processes, and ultimately foster a more diverse and inclusive environment for both visitors and staff alike. But how do such initiatives get off the ground? How do individuals build support among all stakeholders and successfully advocate for new positions, programs, and cross-departmental working groups? How can colleagues work together across departments to foster more inclusive museum practices? This book from the American Alliance of Museums brings together a collection of tools, solutions, and models from DEAI practitioners who have actively worked together towards institutional change. With 60% BIPOC authorship, this book will provide hope and inspiration, as well as concrete strategies for museum workers all over the country who are achieving small wins and fostering sweeping change in the predominantly white cultural sector through innovation, collaboration, and courage. This is the first book to focus specifically on collaborative and inclusive practices in equity and anti-racism work in different types of museums. Its case studies demonstrate the importance of relationship building, authentic connections, and developing foundations together over time, providing a much-needed resource for museum professionals at every level who are grappling with inequities that are pervasive in museums.

Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.

Designing Museum Experiences is a “how-to” book for creating visitor-centered museums that emotionally and intellectually connect with museum visitors, stakeholders, and donors. Museums are changing from static, monolithic, and encyclopedic institutions to institutions that are visitor-centric, with shared authority that allows museum and visitors to become co-creators in content creation. Museum content is also changing, from static content to dynamic, evolving content that is multi-cultural and transparent regarding the evolution of facts and histories, allowing multi-person interpretations of events. Designing Museum Experiences leads readers through the methods and tools of the three stages of a museum visit (Pre-visit, In-Person Visit, and Post-visit), with a goal of motivating visitors to return and revisit the museum in the future. This museum visitation loop creates meaningful intellectual, emotional, and experiential value for the visitor. Using the business-world-proven methodologies of user centered design, Museum Visitor Experience leads the reader through the process of creating value for the visitor. Providing consistent messaging at all touchpoints (website, social media, museum staff visitor services, museum signage, etc.) creates a trusted bond between visitor and museum. The tools used to increase understanding of and encourage empathy for the museum visitor, and understand visitor motivations include: Empathy Mapping, Personas, Audience segmentation, Visitor Journey Mapping, Service Design Blueprints, System Mapping, Content Mapping, Museum Context Mapping, Stakeholder Mapping, and the Visitor Value Proposition. In the end, the reason for using the tools is to empower visitors and meet their emotional and intellectual needs, with the goal of creating a lifelong bond between museum and visitor. This is especially important as museums face a new post COVID-19 reality; only the most nimble, visitor-centered museums are likely to survive. The companion website to Designing Museum Experiences features: Links to additional visitor-centered museum information Downloadable sample documents and templates Bibliography of sources for further reading Online glossary of museum visitor experience terms Daily checklists of “how-to” provide and receive visitor-centered experiences More than 50 associated Designing Museum Experiences documents